Bush Makes Interregnum Work

Earlier in the week I wrote that the Interregnum – the transition period between presidential administrations – is too long. It now lasts ten weeks from election until the January 20 inaugural, prohibiting our new president from taking needed action at a time of nationl crisis. Many have also been simultaneously advocating a new politics based on competence and pragmatism rather than ideology. It looks like outgoing president George W. Bush was thinking along the very same lines. Thanks to Bushs final wise decision to become invisible, the pragmatic reality is that the Barack Obama Administration has already started.

The press is full of stories about Obamas new cabinet picks and the members of his financial team. The public and the stock market have reacted with glee. Business is thankful that there may be a route out of the calamitous fiscal disaster that America now finds itself. Liberals (they can feel free to use that word again) are delighted that a second Franklin Delano Roosevelt has emerged at a time eerily reminiscent of the early 1930’s. Conservative hardliners are silent, pining for Sarah Palin and privately grateful for their own personal retirement accounts that Bushs ill-conceived privatization of Social Security ran up against a stone wall. Image voters long term reaction against the GOP if that folly had come to pass.

All of this is due to our soon to be former presidents idea to take a powder immediately after the Obama-Biden victory. While some will say his lack of action was because he and his team didnt have a clue how to address the problem or that they, like Herbert Hoover, were philosophically opposed to broader government intervention, it doesnt matter. Bush made this interregnum work.

He understood that his moral authority was gone. Whether or not he had any solutions to the financial debacle, he pragmatically chose to defer to his successor. He did so in a way that exhibited no bitterness and, other than trying to enact a last few anti-environment and anti-labor federal regulations, without any attempt to torpedo Obama and his new team. When all is said and done, it was one of President Bushs better moves. Barring a terrorist attack when America will need an official president at the helm, Bushs pragmatic lack of action and near invisibility will set a new tradition for the prudent handling of future presidential transitions.